So, today’s results were kind of a weird mixed bag.
I’m still going through the basics courses, so I did this exercise on lighting where you are given a bedroom scene, all ready to go except for the lights. The goal is to get decent lighting for a daytime scene and a nighttime scene.
This is what I came up with.
I think they look pretty nice, all in all.
The next course I looked at was character rigging fundamentals. They did the course with a model of their mascot, but I decided to be a bit extra and try to model up a character of my own to practice rigging with. It’s jumping ahead a bit, but I saw a decent tutorial on youtube, so I thought I’d give it a try.
The sad thing is, the simple character model turned into practice for things like multiresolution and sculpting, and while I think the end result was pretty cool, it took so long that I didn’t have time to really do any rigging today. So I tried out the last thing that they mentioned in the course: blender’s built in add-on for automatic rigging. Seemed like a good time-saver so I could at least give my guy an interesting pose and render it out for the blog.
The only problem is the automatic rig is super complex, and it didn’t work quite right out of the box. The course didn’t give any real instruction on how to actually use that one specifically, and I was having a heck of a time getting it to properly pose the character. I did eventually manage to get the hands working at least, so that’s set up.
Then, when I went to set up the lighting for the scene I discovered that for reasons unknown my character was completely invisible to standard lamps. It shows up for sun lamps and environment lighting, but it ignores all the rest. That also wasn’t something covered in the course, so I’m going to have to research it later to figure out where I went wrong.
Regardless, I did finally get a render of the character we’ve dubbed “Creepy Hands”, on account of the particularly creepy hands. They didn’t come out quite right in the original mesh, not unexpected since it’s my first time even attempting real hands. I tried to use the sculpting to fix them, but they just sort of warped and elongated and got, well, creepy. I think I actually know how to fix them now, but he already had a name, so there was no going back. I let the creepy hands inform the rest of the sculpt and let my vaguely human low-poly character warp into this:
Early days still, but I think with a bit of practice I could actually make some really cool stuff with these sculpting tools. I just have to work out all of the do’s and don’ts around texturing and posing with sculpted models. But, that’s why I’m doing the training.